For years, renowned epidemiologist Alison Galvani suspected that she spent part of her childhood raised by a killer.
But nothing the Bay Area native did — not the private investigator she hired, the relatives and detectives she spoke with, the research she did independently — convinced authorities there was sufficient evidence to arrest the man she believed responsible for the death of her mother, Nancy Galvani, in 1982.
That changed last week, when authorities took her father into custody.
The police department in Foster City, about 20 miles south of San Francisco, announced they arrested 81-year-old Patrick Galvani without incident.
The San Mateo district attorney’s office charged him with murder Tuesday. He is in custody in the Maguire Correctional Facility in Redwood City and is due back in court on Friday.
Galvani’s attorney, Douglas Horngrad, issued a statement, saying his client “is innocent.”
“This murder charge was filed against him years ago and the case was dismissed for lack of evidence,” Horngrad wrote in an email. “As I understand it, the evidence is the same, and we believe the outcome will be the same. Mr. Galvani will be exonerated again.”
San Mateo County Dist. Atty. Stephen Wagstaffe said new evidence would be presented, but didn’t elaborate on what that would be, only noting that it “isn’t DNA evidence.”
“We think we have enough to convict and we have an ambitious prosecutor who can accomplish that,” he said.
Wagstaffe added that he “loved” Horngrad, but balked at the defense attorney’s claim that there was no new evidence in the case.
“How would he even know? We just filed,” Wagstaffe said.
The Foster City Police Department also did not divulge what circumstances may have changed that prompted Patrick Galvani’s arrest and did not comment when reached by a Times reporter.
Alison Galvani, who lives in Connecticut and is the founding director of the Yale Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis, initially declined to comment to media outlets. However, on Wednesday morning she thanked the San Mateo County district attorney’s office and the Foster City Police Department, “who have been committed to pursuing justice for my mom.”
“With an extraordinary combination of compassion and resolve, they are working tirelessly to ensure that light is shone upon even the darkest of cases,” she wrote in a text message.
Fisherman found Nancy Galvani’s body floating near the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge in August 1982.
She was wearing only underpants, bound by her ankles and stuffed into a sleeping bag weighted with a cinder block. Authorities later announced she had been strangled.
Nancy had filed for divorce from her husband as well as a restraining order in the summer of 1982. She moved out of the family’s Victorian home in wealthy Pacific Heights into a residential hotel in San Francisco’s crime-ridden Tenderloin District.
The two had been sharing custody of Alison, then 5, when Patrick called his estranged wife on Aug. 8 to pick up their daughter a day earlier than they had agreed upon.
Nancy left the hotel that evening and was never seen again. Her yellow Buick, however, was found in the garage where Patrick lived.
Patrick was initially arrested and charged by Keith Sorenson, the then-San Mateo County district attorney, who is now deceased.
Eventually, prosecutors dropped the charges due to a lack of witnesses and evidence. Sorenson told the San Francisco Examiner in 1982 that prosecutors concluded they had less than a 50% chance of conviction, though he added, “I am not saying for a minute that he is innocent or didn’t do it.”
Wagstaffe said he is the only remaining member of a five-person team from the district attorney’s office that attempted to prosecute Patrick Galvani the first time around. He said he agreed that members of the team felt then that they lacked strong enough evidence to convict.
One retired detective who worked the case told The Times in 2014 that some physical evidence had been accidentally destroyed.
That year, Patrick Galvani’s then-attorney said his client had passed a lie-detector test. In court documents, Patrick said his wife had been suffering from “mental illness.”
Alison Galvani told The Times in 2014 that she struggled with the possibility that she may have played a role in her mother’s murder.
“My father used me as bait to lure my mother to her death,” she said.
Alison was eventually sent to an English boarding school when she was 11.
A close friend first suggested to a teenaged Alison that her father killed her mother. While Alison rejected the claim and almost severed the friendship, she never dismissed the suspicion.
She later told The Times that she asked her father to walk in front of her during her wedding because she didn’t want “to have to touch him,” though she didn’t quite understand the sentiment.
It wasn’t until he visited her, then a new mother living in Connecticut with her husband in 2008, that she blurted out “you killed my mother.”
His denial to that accusation, she said, was, “It wasn’t my fault.”
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